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Apr 30, 2013 | Pat McCaughan

ENS: Churches Prepare for Disaster, Create Community Networks

In the event of earthquake or fires or other disaster, Betsy Eddy will tweet an invitation to San Francisco’s Diamond Heights community, to come to St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church for food and resource information.

 

It’s just one part of the church’s — and the neighborhood’s — disaster preparedness plan. It makes use of existing resources because “we already have a food pantry every Friday that serves over 100 in our zip code,” said Eddy, a St. Aidan’s parishioner.

 

“We know there will be a need for food in an emergency situation and we are working with the San Francisco Food Bank so they know we will be a food distribution site in Diamond Heights.”

 

Collaborating with others in the community is key to the plan — still a work in progress, said Eddy in a recent interview with the Episcopal News Service. She was preparing for an April 24 meeting with the Diamond Heights Disaster Ready Working Group (DRWG), which she and the Rev. Tommy Dillon, St. Aidan’s rector, helped to start about five years ago.

 

“We’re trying to create this whole network of preparedness and joining together,” she said of DRWG. Its members are neighborhood businesses and organizations that have met regularly since 2008.

 

“Today we’re talking about our plan to contact people in the neighborhood who want to be contacted, maybe who live alone, have disabilities, an older person who needs somebody to check on them because of chronic disease or because of inability to do the activities of daily living.”

 

Increasingly, local Episcopal churches and dioceses and, in some cases provinces and even regional entities, are collaborating to prepare for inevitable disasters, according to Katie Mears, director of US Disaster Preparedness and Response for Episcopal Relief & Development.

 

Reaching out to others in Diamond Heights

St. Aidan’s Church, as much of Diamond Heights, sits “on a hill and we’re in danger of landslides. We also have a very great fire danger because it’s windy here,” said Eddy. “Diamond Heights is a mixed area where we have a few expensive homes but we also have over 600 units of affordable housing which could mean vulnerable residents in the event of a disaster.”

 

Both she and Dillon knew enough about disasters to know they wanted to be as prepared as possible for the next one, she said.

 

Prior to moving to San Francisco about six years ago, Dillon had mobilized his Baton Rouge, Louisiana parish to respond in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which in 2005 killed more than 1,800 people and caused an estimated $81 billion in property damage.

 

Eddy had lived through the Loma Prieta earthquake, a magnitude-6.9 temblor that occurred during the warm-up of the third game of the 1989 Major League Baseball World Series. It killed about 60 people, injured more than 3,700 and left thousands homeless. Although it didn’t directly affect Eddy’s neighborhood “it was enough to scare me,” she said. “There was enough death and destruction that it was pretty scary.”

 

All of which got them thinking that “people need information on how to prepare” for the inevitable next disaster, she said. Things like “how we meet after a disaster. How do we assess what are the needs. We’re also including all types of disasters, including terrorist and biochemical incidents. We’re planning for neighborhood emergency situations and regional disasters.”

 

They’ve created a website with resources and on June 6 will meet with local city and human service officials, businesses and residents associations to discuss the draft plan, she said.

 

“What’s really been important with our core group is, we’ve created such strong bonds with each other that even if the big earthquake hits tomorrow we’re going to be able to work much better together, because we already have that bond and connectedness in the neighborhood,” Eddy said.

 

Dioceses receive training; getting ready

On April 25, the Rev. Russ Oeschel, archdeacon and disaster preparedness coordinator for the Episcopal Diocese of Texas, “was getting ready to deploy” members of a diocesan emergency spiritual care team to the city of West, near Waco, where an April 17 fertilizer plant explosion killed 14 people, including 11 first responders.

 

The team and its members, both clergy and laity, are one aspect of the diocesan disaster preparedness and response plan. They aren’t the “recovery people, but they are in the next wave, whenever it is residents are allowed back into areas damaged, we’re there to provide spiritual care as they begin to assess what’s happened to them.”

 

Read the rest of the story from ENS